For Evo’s birthday, check out Max & Ivan: Fugitives & Shadowmagic + 2 complete series, 4 season finales, and 1 new season coming soon! 🎧😎 — The End #40

It’s my birthday weekend, and you probably want to know what you should get me, right? Listening to one or more of the stories presented below would be a great start. But I’d love to see you become a supporter of The End, if that’s something you can do.

Oh, and I’ve started listing some special notes about some of the shows listed. Look for the bold text below and see if that adds some additional context for you. I’d love to hear what you think.

- Evo, the birthday boy

Featured Audio Fiction

These are my personal recommendations for great-sounding audio fiction. As with all things in life, YMMV.

Max & Ivan: Fugitives — Dramatized comedy thriller from Storyglass

Two lowly tech developers acquire a laptop full of contraband data, witness a murder, and then narrowly escape being assassinated. Suddenly, they find themselves sucked into a world of state-funded disinformation campaigns, bot farms, all-knowing Big Data organisations, and shadowy terror groups.

Inspired by the chaotic way global politics is currently unfolding, Max & Ivan: Fugitives is an on-the-run comedy thriller set across international borders. Written and performed by Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez it stars Gemma Whelan, Alice Lowe, Adam Buxton, Kyle Kinane and Stephen Mangan. The cast also includes Celeste Dring, Dan Tetsell, Elina Alminas, Ernest Gromov, Freya Parker, Jak Malone, Jason Forbes, Justin Edwards, Katia Kvinge, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Sammy Broly and Steve Furst.

Sound design is by Rich Evans and photography by Idil Sukan. The series is produced by Ben Walker for Storyglass.

• Series complete as of 2 Jan 2020
• 8 episodes
• Listening time: 3h 35m
• 💻🔪🌍

Shadowmagic — Narrated fantasy from John Lenahan

“Hi, my name is Conor. Other than my father being a bit of an eccentric lunatic, my life was pretty normal until I got attacked in my living room and whisked away to Tir na Nog, the mystical land of the ancient Celts, where it turns out Dad is the usurped heir to the throne and everybody wants me dead because of some prophecy.

Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

Shadowmagic is a rip-roaring fun fantasy adventure novel by John Lenahan very loosely based on Irish mythology where every chapter ends on the edge of a cliff (or at least a high curb.) Join Conor as he grapples with typical teenage problems like, how to deal with a father’s high expectations, how to survive in the world on your own, and how to woo a beautiful girl — that wants you dead.

Shadowmagic is a podcast novel for young adults from 12 to 112.

• Complete as of 1 Dec 2006
• 31 episodes
• Listening time: 8h 56m
• Two more stories in the series available now!
• 🍀⚔️✨

Season Finales & Finished Series

There’s a good mix of shows in this section today. And again, I’ll remind you to look for the bold text after the descriptions on a few of them. Let me know what you think of that.

Gareth and the Lost Island — Dramatized steampunk fantasy comedy from Venomous Duck Media

On the fantasy world of Hadronus, young Professor Gareth Mintel is saddled with the seemingly impossible task of finding the Lost Island of Mascal. On his quest, he is joined by his adoptive father, their simian butler, and the motley crew of the airship Glorious Dawn.

Characters in this show run the gambit of the gender and sexuality spectrums.

• Season 1 finale released 7 Jun 2023
• 11 episodes
• Listening time: 6h 29m
• Season 2 starts May 2024
• 🤣⚔🧝‍♂️

Hex Noir — Dramatized horror from Hilmar Loftsson

A Victorian/gothic metropolis full of corruption and hidden terrors. Do you dare to explore the maddening horrors hidden within? Plunge yourself into a dark world of monsters, blood magic, and maddening conspiracies.

• Season 2 finale released 7 Jun 2023
• 18 episodes
• Listening time: 7h 11m
• Season 3 starts 21 Jun 2023 (not a typo)
• 👹🩸😱

The Strata — Dramatized scifi series from Mark R. Healy

In a dystopian city, an ageing courier is forced to go into business with an underworld ganglord in order to pay for the treatment that keeps him alive.

• Season 8 finale released 6 Jun 2023
• 50 episodes
• Listening time: 22h 10m
• Season 9 starts Aug 2023
• 🦾🤖👩‍💻

Love Items — Dramatized romcom from Studio Ochenta

This series follows the love stories of Cloe, an AI researcher, and Eloc, her artificial intelligence assistant. After discovering that Eloc has the power to analyze the love in the objects, Cloe decides to steal objects from the guys she dates in order to find “the right one.”

This is a multilingual podcast. You can find it as Love Items (FR) in French and Cositas de amor in Spanish.

• Season 1 finale released 5 May 2023
• 25 episodes
• Listening time: 1h 56m
• 🥰🤖🐹

Pearl River Remains — Narrated southern gothic ghost story from Daryl Lisa Fazio

When human bones are discovered in a Mississippi river bed, Fran Boden — a loner with peculiar gifts — returns to her small town to probe the origins of her mother’s long-ago disappearance and confront the ghosts of her family, both living and dead.

• Series complete as of 12 Oct 2022
• 22 episodes
• Listening time: 9h 01m
• 💧🩸🫥

Edith! — Dramatized comedic historical fiction from QCODE & Crooked Media

Rosamund Pike stars as Edith Wilson in “Edith!” a scripted comedy podcast exploring the untold true-ish story of America’s secret First Female President.

• Series complete as of 5 Aug 2021
• 8 episodes
• Listening time: 4h 29m
• 🇺🇸📜😆

New Seasons Coming Soon

Presented by Radio Drama Revival, one of the internet’s longest-running anthology audio drama shows, with the goal of showcasing the diversity and vitality of modern audio fiction.

Returning on 1 Jul 2023

Auricle, a dramatized urban sci-fi anthology from Auricle, returns for Season 2.

• 4 current episodes
• Listening time: 1h 42m
• 🌎💌🤖

And that’s it for the audio fiction shows in the most recent issue of The End, the newsletter that shines a light back on audio fiction shows after they’ve reached the finale of a season or the conclusion of the series.

More information, including how you can get your audiobook, audiodrama or fiction podcast highlighted in a future issue, visit TheEnd.fyi.